Thursday, December 6, 2012

DEC 6: Barrie Jean Borich on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

In one of the opening sequence panels
of Alison Bechdel’s graphic book-length essay Are You My Mother? (yes, I claim this whole book for the essay) the
author has drawn herself behind the wheel of a car, a noir Dick Tracy-like self
portrait with a question mark hovering in front of her face. This is an instance of impassioned
questioning, a graphic gesture of not only the frantic action of a pivotal
moment but also the frustration of needing absolutely to know what is not
possible to know. Such is the fury and quest of Are You My Mother? The text in this frame reads YOU CAN’T LIVE AND
WRITE AT THE SAME TIME, but of course— as we read this book that the author
calls a metabook, in a doubly-meta moment on the pages of the book itself— the
reader knows the author is indeed, most perilously, writing and living at the
same time. How essayish of her.

I’m not the only one to call
Bechdel’s first book since her memoir Fun
Home an essay. Nuria Sheehan did so brilliantly in the Fall 2012 issue of Brevity,
writing, “While Fun
Home moved forward through narrative, building to revelations about erotic
truth and the queer desire experienced by both the narrator and her father, Are
You My Mother? circles around meaning… narrative is secondary to the
essaying, as the narrator tirelessly attempts to understand herself, her
mother, and the world by juxtaposing memories with psychoanalytic literature
and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.”

Let’s assume we can agree, for now
at least, to see this book as graphically Montaigne-ish; what then is the
beauty of the essay, and how does this beauty differ from that of the memoir?

What I’ll disclose before saying
more might be obvious who anyone who knows both me and Are You My Mother? First: I am one of those narratively essayistic
writers working in-between memoir and essay. I allow my spinning ruminations on maps and
memory, as well as vignettes of family dysfunction and lesbian love, to be
called memoir, in hopes that the work will find some grubby cubbyhole in the essay-dissing
lit marketplace, but at the same time I dislike the cap of redemptive expectation
the word memoir places over my work. Second: a version of me appears in a
couple of panels of Bechdel’s new book, because Alison and I were friends in
the late 1980s lesbian world of Minneapolis, Minnesota in the days (as she and
I like to say) before “creative nonfiction.”
Which might suggest I have a stake in this book beyond that of just
another reader, and perhaps I do, but perhaps not entirely for the reasons I
state above. Rather, I have a stake in both the essay and in work by genre
indeterminate queer women, both being forms not well-enough loved in most of
the worlds I inhabit.

I write this now because I keep
hearing readers say they like this book but not as much as they loved Fun Home. I do love Fun Home too, as a memoir (though some have suggested that book
might also be claimed for the essay, and perhaps so especially if we consider
essay and story to be opposing poles with memoir moving back-and-forth on the
slider in-between). I love Fun Home
for many reasons, but mostly for its form, the way Bechdel disrupts story by
revealing the central crisis at the start of the book. We know right away that
her father’s death was probably a suicide, which then makes the book’s
narrative arc that of figuring out how to come to terms with this death and both
her father’s and her own homosexuality. Fun
Home is a double coming-out story turned inside out and backwards, and
succeeds the ways intricately plotted and disrupted films like Run Lola Run and Memento and Pulp Fiction
succeed, by shaking down, questioning, and re-inhabiting time. In these works,
and in Fun Home, we experience the
pleasure of story, but that pleasure is interrupted by another pleasure, the
surprise of revealing the stories within stories that transform the way all
narrative is understood.

Because I knew the author before
she wrote Fun Home I also know how
long she was inhabited by her origin story. Everyone who knew Bechdel when she
lived in Minneapolis (with the lover named Eloise in Are You My Mother?) knew the story of her father’s secret life and death
and anyone who talked to her about her work knew that one day she’d find a way to
tell this story, visually and textually. Most writers who carry a formative narrative
of loss and forbearance have to write that story, and these days that story is
probably a memoir. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is
an example of this, as is Mark Doty’s Heaven’s
Coast, Mira Bartok’s TheMemory Palace, Joy Castro’s The Truth Book, to name just a few. These are all books led by some unavoidable
life story, and supported by the author’s thinking about that story, and their
beauty is expressed through the language, container, and arc the writer creates
to find meaning in their tale.

Are
You My Mother? is another kind of project, and, in terms of the artist’s career,
more complex and ambitious art, because she had no single base story to bend,
except perhaps the immersive societal lie about mothers and daughters, a master
narrative bound to gender conformity, heterosexuality and sentimentality, none
of which apply to the relationship of Bechdel and her mother. What the author did
have to work with was an intense flat-line of repeating scenic action made of a
mother and daughter’s echoing grief, beleaguered identities, and intellectual
dissatisfactions, so what is disrupt-able in this work is less a story than a
condition. As in Fun Home she turns
to big texts to guide her, but this time uses psychological speculation, dreams,
and Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose to direct her query. The
question of what the narrator is to make of both self and daughterhood is at
the forefront of the telling, and the scenic moments— from phone calls to
therapy sessions to sex– come into play only in service of questions, ideas,
and suppositions about the daughter-mother bond. In the process the daughter
both includes and moves beyond the parameters of the lesbian story, applying
that noir question mark to the complex needs, desires, and strategies of all
human attachment.

What I mean is Bechdel truly essays
in this book, the way James Baldwin essays in that moment of “Notes of a Native
Son” when he throws a half-full water mug at a waitress and shatters the mirror
over a bar where they “don’t serve Negroes”. Baldwin begins with the conditions
of his life as a Black man in an exploding America. At the same time he essays
into a psychology of rage and revelation, and finally tells us not just what
racism is but also how racism feels and what racism means. What follows is our
more complex understanding of how humanness feels and what humanness means. The
beauty of the essay form is an uncomfortable and hard-won beauty, more
difficult to read than most stories —we have to slow down, discern, reread and
pause for understanding—but discursive rumination supported by story is a
necessary way into rethinking our worlds. I don’t mean to say the essay is a
better beauty than memoir, but it is often one that takes more work to read,
and has a different sort of payoff. Even in its most lyric forms the essay assumes
thinkiness is no less valid than emotion, and in doing so might give us the
intellectual tools we need to re-architect the ways we live.

I know it’s foolish to wish for
readers-at-large to climb into the essay in the same way they do story. Essays
don’t allow us to collapse into the dream of linear narrative. The best essays
are “tough love” mothers, hurling us directly back to that huge cartoon
question mark hanging over all our heads. Stories do this too, some stories do
this very well, and I’m not against story, but I love, and want others to
learn to love, the ways essays hurl us unmasked into the not-knowing.

Another panel of Are You My Mother?, a two-pager from the
center of the book, illustrates what I really have at stake in essaying about
this book I insist on claiming for the essay.

The image is a layered cacophony: part
homage to Dr. Seuss, part a still life of the artist’s eyeglasses, her father’s
letters to her mother and other ephemera, part a highlighting of another psychoanalytic
quotation applied to her relationship to her mother. The Doctor Seuss image serves
as the author’s “room of one’s own” and as
an architecture of unconventional creativity, and as a womb. The page is a
chaos, yet all is connected. The lesbian daughter. The thesbian mother. The missing
father. The mother’s enclosures and imprisonments. The daughter’s convoluted
pathways of escape as she does, absolutely, live and write at the same time. These
two pages are essay as palimpsest. The echoes and erasures, here and throughout
the book, probe old and new ways of understanding the social and the intimate
self, so much so that this work could add up to be one of the great essays of
our day, or at least one of the most original. What I have at stake here is the
way out this book offers someone like me, should the world we all share finally
let itself be seen through Alison Bechdel’s always essaying gaze.

All images from Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. Used by permission.

BARRIE
JEAN BORICH is the author of BODY GEOGRAPHIC, forthcoming in the
American Lives Series of the University of Nebraska Press. Her previous book, MY
LESBIAN HUSBAND (Graywolf) won the American Library Association Stonewall
Book Award, and she was the first nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review.
She teaches at Chicago’s DePaul University, in the English Department and the MA in Writing and Publishing
Program, and splits her time between Minneapolis and Chicago.

3 comments:

"The question of what the narrator is to make of both self and daughterhood is at the forefront of the telling..." I'm reading Are You My Mother? very, very slowly, tracing Bechdel's route into this mystery, feeling like a trusted adventurer alongside her. Thank you Barrie for bringing me a greater sense of the essays of loss and forebearance, and the complex territory that comes afterward. I will return to this piece again to help navigate my understanding of my own memoir/essay.

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